On 01/03/2026 23:54, Collin Funk wrote:
Pádraig Brady <[email protected]> writes:
Yes I can see the intent of disallowing -p with -C.
I.e. if there is no content,ownership,perm change
then don't update anything in the destination, including timestamps.
I.e. -C is for performance, and -p would lose some of that.
However if the user explicitly wants the timestamps updated
there should be no problem with that.
As for performance implications, there may be some, especially for repeated
install runs,
as the updated mtime would be written to disk and the meta-data cache
would be invalidated.
But if the user wants up to date mtime then it doesn't completely invalidate
the performance obtained with -C, as the page cache shouldn't be invalidated,
and we would still be avoiding data writes.
Here is a proposed patch that allows the options to be used together.
It's best not to set timestamps in two places.
Could we adjust copy_file to return OK,FAIL,SKIP enum
and then adjust the conditionals in install_file_in_file() ?
Also we could add a line to the test to be more robust:
echo a > a || framework_failure_
echo a > b || framework_failure_
touch -d 2026-01-01 a || framework_failure_
test b -nt a || framework_failure_ # Handle systems with bad time
thanks,
Padraig
